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Some Newton North kids pulled a Dukes of Hazard in the school driveway

Village 14 has a copy of the e-mail Newton North High School's principal sent to parents yesterday after some of Newton's best and brightest decided it would be a good idea to drive around the school waving a Confederate flag out the window. "We are taking appropriate action," the not at all amused principal writes.

I realize there is a segment of the population that will never get this, but the Confederate flag represents a particularly horrible part of American history and is a direct affront to large parts of the population

Aw, hell, let's cut the crap: The Confederate flag represents treason, slavery, murder on a massive scale. For somebody living well north of the Mason-Dixon line, especially in a state that led the fight against that system, it's a massive affront, basically screaming "Fuck You!" at millions of people.

That make it any clearer?

As for not being illegal, I'm going to assume that a school like Newton North has a code of conduct, that both students and parents have to agree to. And if it's anything like the code of conduct we had to agree to at our daughter's school, a big part of that is respect for other students. Essentially waving a giant Fuck You right outside the school kind of violates that code. I mean, imagine if somebody went around screaming at Newton North kids that they were Christ killers. Does it warrant jail time? No. Some sort of academic discipline? Yes.

No one's contending that they were ILLEGAL, period, full stop. If, however, you think that any thing that isn't ILLEGAL, period, full stop, can be done anywhere and anytime you want, I encourage you to run up and down the hallways of your place of employment with a traitor flag and see what comes of it. Go on, do. Report back.

How did I miss this gem on my earlier pass through this thread. Masterful pivot, anon. Did your Google Alert on race go off? Checking for Confederate flag references is pretty inside-baseball, but I commend your dedication. And the loud insistence on the legality of these chuckleheads' driving is bordering on relevant, as long as you ignore the fact that literally no one is claiming otherwise. And then transitioning to BLM, based on legality! That's sort-of-contextually-correct! You guys are getting better by the day. Another six months of this, and the casual reader might think you're something other than a Markov chain bot deployed by Breitbart.

Technically you're the first poster to respond with "Godwin's Law". Invoking the law in a discussion has now become just about as cliched as the offense of bringing up Nazism itself. And despite its overuse, there are appropriate times to make comparisons to Nazism. What other well-known flag would you compare the Confederate flag to?

The racist, greedy, fat confederates got their safe space invaded when the northerners went down there and kicked their useless asses. The confederate flag is the flag of racist, uneducated losers. No wonder republicans still wave it proudly.

1. Hazzard has two 'zeez'.
2. Lincoln was a Republican, the South was fought with the Grand Army of the Republic.
3. Bull Connor (look him up) was on the Democratic National Committee.
4. I guess Newton North must be a hotbed of republican-ness according to your analysis.

I am so sick of assholes like you, that when you see the Confederate Battle Flag, immediately jump in with some inane remark about Republicans. It was the Democrats that waved it. There's a campaign button with Bill C's name on it and the stars and bars. 'C' as in Clinton, yup, Hillary's husband.

OK, so the Southern Strategy led to, in no particular order...President Goldwater, President Wallace (ya, I know, but sometimes things backfire) , President Nixon...wait a second, Nixon? What's going on here?

Well, U Mich states ""President Nixon shrewdly played this "Southern strategy" by promoting affirmative action in employment, a "wedge" issue that later Republicans would exploit to split the Democratic coalition of white working class and black voters."
So the same Republican that brought us the EPA also brought us affirmative action in employment. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

But before then, well, let's see...President Eisenhower, a better golfer than our current president, called out the airborne to enforce the rights in Brown.
He was a Republican. Wallace was a Democrat.

You don't even want to know about President Wilson, or Margaret Sanger, beloved icon of Planned Parenthood. Or, for that matter, the famous LBJ quote concerning the passing of the Civil Rights Act. Clue...unless you're a rap musician, you can't even say it out loud. Or even type it here.

Bottom line is, the Dems (and real progressives) have not really covered themselves with glory.

Can I borrow the time machine you used to travel here from 1964? The Republican Party has been the go-to party for nostalgic/racist Southerners, pretty much since the SOUTHERN DEMOCRAT Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act.

If an adult did this, it would unambiguously be protected speech. Public schools are government entities, and as the supreme Court famously said (tinker?), students don't she'd their rights at the school door. At the same time, courts have found that school officials have a lot more authority over students than government generally has over citizens.

I don't know if this is settled law or if this has the potential to be a supreme Court case.

They're not going to charge them with anything but driving like assholes in a school parking lot. So that ends the constitutional challenge, so long as any counselling or service requirement the school imposes doesn't get in the way of their access to education. They have lots of room to make those kids eat those sentiments, but I don't believe they would be likely to, say, expel them. Anything less than that I feel like is an appropriate zone of punishment or social education or whatever.

They could always claim that they were distracting boys. Since that seems to be an approved excuse to make a girl in a high v-neck sweater go home and change, it should work for treason flags in the parking lot, too.

Really? I'm an adult. Tell me where you live and I'll come and offer up some protected speech on your front lawn. If it's raining, I'll do it in your living room.

And before you try the "But it's a PUBLIC SCHOOL" dodge, just because a place is "public" doesn't mean that anyone may use it in any way they choose. Limits on permissible uses of public spaces are perfectly legal, and that includes many limits on speech/expression.

Have you not gone to high school? Never happened to me personally, but plenty of kids were made to turn their tshirts inside out for the day due to whatever was written/picture on the front. Protected speech? Not in a public institution like that.

That's a pretty bold move there, Super Nintendo Fleishman. Would love to hear the logic behind it spelled out... "Some shithead highschool kids did a shitty, racist thing, but it's in the past now. Nothing in the past is relevant to the current situation. NewtonNorth!present is not represented by these students!past. Can't we all just move on, and trust that we'll discipline these students appropriately? Yes, this is also a shitty thing for me to say, but I've already said it, so it's in the past, and as we've established, it no longer matters, and we need to let the healing begin."

As awful as this flag thing might be, I don't think it quite rises to the level of using an electrical cord to threaten a black student with lynching. Also, an issue at BLS was how the school administration responded; that does not seem to be the case here.